New York Times and USA Today Bestselling novelist, screenwriter, editor, namer, critic, movie addict and chocoholic

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Sharon Harrigan talks about her devastating memoir, PLAYING WITH DYNAMITE, about her search for the strange truth about her father

Sharon Harrigan has written a thrilling memoir, PLAYING WITH DYNAMITE, about searching for the truth about her dad, a man who blew off his hand with dynamite before she was born and died in a very, very weird accident.Both about the danger--and relief--of finding the truth, it's also a gorgeously written page-turner.

Sharon teaches memoir writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville. Her work's appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Slice, Narrative, Pearl,
Prime Number, Silk Road, Mid American Review, Louisiana Literature,
Apercus Quarterly, Rain Taxi, Hip Mama, Fiction Writers’ Review,
Streetlight Magazine, Passing Through Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Rumpus. She is a contributing editor at The Nervous Breakdown and at Silk Road Review.Thank you so much for being here, Sharon!

What was the why now
moment which had you write this book? What surprised you in the writing of it?

“The thing you need to know about me is my father died when
I was eight.” That’s the opening of Mary Gordon’s memoir, Shadow Man, but it could have been the first line of Playing with Dynamite, if I changed
“eight” to “seven.” My father’s death was the defining event of my life, and his
mysterious accident haunted me. He went hunting for a deer and a deer killed
him? That never made sense.

So I was always obsessed with my father’s story, but for a
long time I didn’t know how to approach it. I first tried by writing a novel, but
I had too many unanswered questions, questions I was afraid to ask. Without the
answers, I couldn’t get deep enough beneath the surface, so I put that novel
aside and thought I was done trying to write about my father.

Apparently, I was wrong.

After my daughter’s eighth birthday party, I wrote a blog
post that began, “My father never got to see me turn eight.” My brother
responded, and I used his memories to write an essay. After my mother read it,
she seemed compelled to tell me her memories, things she’d been waiting my
whole life for me to be ready to hear. And so many other people responded so
strongly to that essay—more than to anything I’d ever published before—that I knew
there was something about my father’s story. Something universal. Something
everybody seemed to respond to.

But to get to your question: Why now? It was now or never,
since I had to rely on the memories of others, and I needed to interview people
while they were still alive. One person, in fact (my father’s best friend) died
shortly before I was able to talk to him.

What surprised me was how much the book turned into my mother’s
story. She, like so many other women she’d grown up with, had been silenced, as
if her story didn’t matter. What I discovered was her incredible resilience.
Here was a woman who’d had every obstacle thrown at her, and yet she developed
into such a strong and resilient person.

The other “why now” question I’ve been thinking about is,
What makes this story so timely? In one of my many conversations with my mother
in the book, she tells me that my father was “a man of his time.” I began to
see that his story might be the story of a generation—at least a generation of
white working-class men, blue-collar Midwesterners juggling two or three jobs
to support their families in a changing economy. Men who, as my mother put it,
“thought if they changed a diaper they’d grow breasts.” These are the kind of
men everyone wants to know more about now,
especially after the election.

This memoir is so
much about family secrets—has this made you more open yourself? Or do you see
the value in keeping some secrets secrets?

Yes to both of your questions.

I’ve become more open, for sure. One of the big emotional
take-aways from the research I did for Playing
with Dynamite was that openness can create intimacy. It’s always possible,
of course, that revelations can upset people, but I think it’s worth the risk.
I don’t want to live my life only on the surface. I want my relationships to go
deep.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in keeping some things
private. For example, I have a personal essay coming out in Real Simple magazine, and I had a hard
time telling the story I wanted to tell without bringing readers into my
bedroom. If I hadn’t figured out how to avoid the X-rated parts while keeping
the fundamental narrative intact, I wouldn’t have submitted the piece.

And I’m not going to post embarrassing things about my kids
on Facebook or reveal things people ask me not to. So, you know, your secrets
are safe with me.

Was there ever any
moment when you felt unnerved in the writing—as if you were going too deeply back
into the past?

Lots! My mother’s story about what happened to my sister on
the night my father died. The story of my parents’ wedding. My father’s driving
record. The saga with the Harrison Township Police. . .I could go on. It was unnerving to hear people
tell me about these things, in the moment. But now I think they’re beautiful
stories that have a lot to teach me, and I’m grateful for them.

What did you learn
that you didn’t expect to learn in writing this?

I had no idea what I was going to learn, so everything was
unexpected. I started Playing with
Dynamite kind of like a detective starts a case, hunting down a few clues.

One thing I learned was that the act of writing requires
empathy, so to be able to write about my father, I had to see the world through
his perspective. I had to try to get in the heads of all of my characters,
including those I have a hard time understanding, like my sister. Because you
can’t write fully rounded characters unless you imagine what life is like for
them.

What’s obsessing you now and why?

My next book is a novel about identical twins who are so
closely bonded they speak in the same voice, so that carries forward my obsession
with sibling relationships. My brother and I aren’t twins but we’ve always been
super close, so I take that idea and stretch it to its furthest extreme.
Researching this book has been fascinating, since there are so many twin
studies out there.

What question didn’t I ask that I should
have?

I always like to talk about the books that inspired me.
Probably the first memoir I read was The
Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster, which was a revelation. It’s about
how he coped with his father’s recent death and his struggles to father his own
son after divorce. But it’s also a tour de force of style and wit, and I was
fascinated by the way he let us see a mind at work, thinking on the page,
bringing in a whole world of ideas and literary references. Joan Didion is
another writer who does that so well, which is why I like to assign The Year of Magical Thinking to my
classes.

Not surprisingly, I’ve been fascinated by father memoirs,
so, in addition to Mary Gordon’s Shadow
Man, I loved Nick Flynn’s Another
Bullshit Night in Suck City and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. And there are so many others. Kirkus
Reviews compared Playing with
Dynamite to Jeanette Walls’ The Glass
Castle and Mary Carr’s Liar’s Club,
which were seminal books for me and are also about larger-than-life fathers.

But the two most important books were Benjamin Percy’s novel
The Wilding and Michael Hainey’s
memoir, After Visiting Friends. I
couldn’t have written Playing with
Dynamite without them.

So I guess I’m also answering your first question, about
what made me decide to write my memoir. The answer is, partly because of things
that happened to me and partly because of things I read. I’ve always been a
voracious and grateful reader. That’s another thing you need to know about me.

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Stay tuned, THIS OTHER LIFE has sold to Algonquin, my beloved publisher and I am busy writing it now. My 11th novel CRUEL BEAUTIFUL WORLD is an Indie Next Pick. IS THIS TOMORROW was an May Indie Pick. I'm also the New York Times bestselling author of PICTURES OF YOU, a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, a Costco "Pennie's Pick." a NAIBA bestseller and on the Best Books of 2011 List from San Francisco Chronicle, Providence Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Bookmarks Magazine. I'm the recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction. I was a 2013 finalist in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and a finalist in the Nickelodeon Screenwriting Fellowship, four of my novels were optioned for screen, and I talked my way into writing the script for two of them. My essay, HIgh Infidelity, has been optioned for film. I'm a book critic for The San Francisco Chronicle and People Magazine. I teach novel writing for UCLA Extension Writers' Program, and Stanford online, do private fiction editing, and I am a professional namer! I live with my husband, writer/editor Jeff Tamarkin and we beam with pride about our son, an actor/filmmaker in college. Visit me at http://www.carolineleavitt.com.